In the previous post I wrote about the kindness and friendliness of people we encountered on this trip. Let me add that every time we got on a crowded subway, someone jumped up to offer this octogenarian a seat. Every single time. You may read scaremonger articles about violence and crime in the subways and in New York City in general, but all I saw was human decency.

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The Gay Liberation Front event was set for 4:00 pm on Sunday, October 25. Bete, Benj, and I took the subway to the Christopher Street-Stonewall station. After showing the kids the photos on the fence around the Stonewall National Monument (you can see them on the National Park Service website, including one with a very young me), we grabbed sandwiches at a nearby deli, and sat down to eat in Christopher Park.

I had decided to wear a couple of political buttons that day, Free Luigi and the other Chinga la Migra. An elderly woman seated in a wheelchair by the next bench upbraided me for the Free Luigi button, saying she was against violence.

“What about Brian Thompson’s violence?” I replied. “Thompson [the insurance CEO Luigi killed] denied medical care to thousands of people insured by his company, people who died for lack of care, and he would have gone on doing it.” Instead of responding to my argument, the woman repeated her initial statement, until her companion explained that she was hard of hearing. Oh well.

Then it was time to go inside. The visitors’ center was almost empty, so at first I wondered if the whole afternoon would be a dud, but by 4:00 pm the place was packed. “We should’ve rented Yankee Stadium,” I said. Well, perhaps exaggerating somewhat.

Mark Horn made an introductory speech, and then five of us GLFers read excerpts from our memoirs—stories about what led up to the Stonewall Riot, the riot itself, and the organizing we did afterward. A film crew was there, and I’ll post the link once they’ve finished editing.

Much to my delight, Howie Schwartz, his wife Debbie Leifer, and their son Jay were in the audience. Howie is the son of my late friend Barbara Joans, whom I wrote about in 2024, and I’ve stayed close to him and Debbie.

Afterward we took Martin out to dinner at one of his favorite restaurants.

On Monday Bete, Ben, and I went to the Tenement Museum. I’d never visited the place, as it had opened for public tours in the early 1990s, long after I’d left New York. Another expensive day—you can’t just go in and wander around, and the guided tour is $33 per person.

This one’s for me, I thought, expecting the kids to be bored. Later I learned that it was one of the highlights of their trip. For me it was deeply, deeply moving. This was how my paternal grandparents, Reuben from Kishinev and Jennie from Odessa, lived when they came here in 1910. One of these tenement apartments, averaging 325 square feet, typically housed four to eight people, though in some cases up to 18 were crammed into the space. Each had a tiny windowless bedroom, a front room or parlor with a window onto the street, and a kitchen with table, chairs, and sink.

The bathtub was next to the sink. It was covered with an improvised wooden plank whose surface was used for meal preparation. However, those planks would warp and rot, so starting in the 1920s, landlords or the tenants themselves replaced them with metal.

Down the hall two tiny rooms, each containing a toilet, were shared by residents on that floor. It could be a long wait if you had an urgent need.

In 1969, around the time of the Stonewall Riot, I quit my 9-5 and moved into one of those tenement apartments in the Lower East Side, for less than $100/month rent. That way I could support myself working only three days, with the other four for writing and organizing. There still was a bathtub in the kitchen, but at some point the landlord had installed a small toilet in a corner of the front room—one so small that my knees bumped against the door when I closed it.

In the 19th and early 20th century, many Lower East Side residents were employed in garment manufacture. From around 1880 to 1900 they mostly did piecework at home. Entire families, including the children, stitched and assembled clothes in their apartments.

I still remember my grandmother’s old Singer, powered by foot pedal rather than electricity. Grandma never worked for wages. She used her sewing machine to make clothes at home. Grandpa, however, earned his living in the garment industry, as a tailor.

Around the turn of the century, employers in the area began turning loft buildings into factories. They hired women because they could pay them less than men. Our tour guide showed us a photo of rows of women seated by sewing machines.

Next she told us briefly about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, where 146 workers—mostly young immigrant women—died because the owners hadn’t installed sprinklers and had locked the exits to prevent the workers from taking unauthorized breaks. The guide concluded, cheerfully, that public outrage and union organizing resulted in legislation to improve worker safety.

At this point the anger welled up in me. I raised my hand. “Since then,” I said, “employers have moved the garment industry to low-wage countries without safety regulations, so Americans can buy cheap clothes. And just a couple of years ago there was a similar fire in one of those factories in Bangladesh, where lots of women died.”

Nobody responded to my comment. (More about that in my next post.)

The next day, October 27, was our last day on the East coast. We took the subway to Manhattan and the bus from the Port Authority building to East Brunswick, where my sister Jeannette picked us up and brought us to her suburban house for a scrumptious lunch of tuna salad sandwiches and blintzes. While we were there I took the kids for a stroll through the woods across the street.

Benj had expected my sister to be “cool,” like me. I’m not sure what he meant—a troublemaking radical? An old bat who practices kung fu with him? He was surprised to find an upper-middle-class attorney. The kids liked her, though, and liked New Jersey. Next day the three of us flew back to Portland.